''These demonstrations were clearly designed to intimidate and to prevent a simple count of votes from going forward,'' Lieberman said at Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's home here. ''This is a time to honor the rule of law, not surrender to the rule of the mob.''

He called for calm, saying, ''This is a time to lower the rhetoric,'' but he also raised the specter that Republicans will mount similar anti-recount rallies in Broward County. He called on Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to stop any such disruptions.

Democrats have been painting Republicans as attempting to break the law and stop recounts that the Florida Supreme Court ruled should be completed by 5 p.m. Sunday. Some demonstrators said they joined the Miami-Dade rally after getting automated phone calls from local Republicans and hearing rumors that the recount was biased against Cuban-American areas, which usually go for Republican candidates.

But David Leahy, the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board supervisor, denied media reports that he and the other two commissioners had been intimidated by protesters into abandoning the recount, which had begun on Monday. The rally degenerated into pushing and punching and even an attempt to storm the room where the recount was being held before police restored peace.

''I didn't feel threatened or harmed at any time,'' Leahy said Friday in a telephone interview, recalling that he could hear chanting from the 18th and 19th floors, where the recount work was being conducted. ''The protest, itself, was not a factor in my decision. Didn't have to be.''

Six members of Congress wrote a letter urging the Justice Department to look into the protest, and a department spokeswoman said the request will be reviewed.

According to Leahy's retelling of events, motives were mistakenly attributed to the board's actions -- moving the work to another room and finally stopping the recount -- and a tense situation escalated when both Republicans and Democrats made baseless accusations.

It was lack of time that prompted the canvassing board to abandon the recount, Leahy said. The board had originally estimated it could finish a recount, examine the flawed ballots and certify results by Dec. 1. Leahy said he was taken aback when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the work had to be finished by Sunday. After two days of counting, the board had completed only 141 out of 614 precincts.

''The bottom line was it was not enough time,'' Leahy said. ''We had already been working 12 to 14 hours a day. You can only look at holes in ballots so long ... Nobody called us to see what was a realistic deadline.''

Canvassing officials estimated that they would have to examine 300 ballots an hour to make the court deadline, but they found that far from attainable after two days' work. ''If we were doing 100 an hour, that'd be moving,'' Leahy said.

When the examination of ballots was moved from a public area to Leahy's office, angry protesters accused the board of working in secret and tried to storm the office.

Leahy said the work was moved to speed up the pace, allowing officials to examine the ballots and also be present when votes were tabulated, as required by law. His office is where the tabulation machines were located.

He believes that the anti-Cuban rumor started because he and the two other commissioners, Lawrence King Jr. and Miriam Lehr, did the recount in numerical order, starting with the first precinct. The 141 precincts counted so far were mainly in the northern part of the county and Miami Beach, which are predominantly Democratic areas, Leahy said. The Cuban-American precincts start in the 300s.

At one point the board discussed certifying partial recounts but decided not to. ''To do that would have been incredibly bad policy -- to only certify partial returns, because it'd be skewed by which precinct you do and which precinct you don't do,'' Leahy said.